Letters: Global warming, bankruptcy and more

Since 2008, dozens of California-based organizations have placed EDF Climate Corps fellows in their facilities to save money and reduce emissions by cutting energy waste. EDF Climate Corps is Environmental Defense Fund’s innovative summer fellowship program that places specially trained graduate students in companies, universities, and municipalities to identify actionable, cost-effective opportunities to save money by saving energy. Past EDF fellows have worked in San Diego with companies including Cricket Communications, Akamai Technologies and, this summer, San Diego State University.

These are but three examples from the more than 285 EDF fellows to date, which show how reducing greenhouse gas emissions can benefit the bottom line. Since San Diego is rich with institutions of higher learning as well as many buildings that could benefit from improved energy efficiency and smart energy management, it is clear that a scaled up presence of EDF Climate Corps in the City would benefit the local economy and environment as a whole.

I urge Mayor Filner provide the leadership that would demonstrate the advantages that our city could capture by reducing a company’s footprint while saving money.

Art Cooley

Founding Trustee, Environmental Defense Fund

La Jolla

Chula Vista versus Stockton

The story about Stockton’s bankruptcy woes in the April 2 edition said: “(Stockton’s) salaries, benefits, and borrowing were based on anticipated long-term developer fees and increasing property tax revenue. But those were lost in a flurry,” in the sub-prime mortgage collapse in the mid-2000s.

Chula Vista is only slightly smaller than Stockon, and that is exactly what happened to Chula Vista. Developers in Chula Vista were building 2,000-3,000 new residential units a year, and it all came to a screeching halt in about a week.

During the boom years of 2002 to 2006, Steve Padilla was our one-term mayor. By 5-0 votes, the Council not only spent all those boom-years’ income, they also spent down the reserves from 20.6 percnet to 6.3 percent, and they also borrowed heavily against expected future developer fees to rebuild the entire City Hall complex. That is what the new mayor inherited in 2006 at the beginning of the collapse. We have been told that the city needs to issue some 800 new building permits a year just to service that debt.

Chula Vista is not out of danger yet, but so far Chula Vista’s Council and its employees have done a good job of keeping the city solvent, while maintaining a fairly good level of service.

Peter Watry

Chula Vista

Partisan business beliefs

The April 2 business section article, “The cost of cutting costs,” might as well have been titled, “Partisan business beliefs according to Bloomberg News.”

Unlike most other news topics, “business news” is harder to twist and spin in your political direction to manipulate readers. Business news is too objective to make stuff up and get away with it.

This article stresses how great Costco is doing for paying its employees far more than minimum wage, yet how Walmart is struggling to make it due to its cuts in employees and benefits. Empty shelves and poor service.

What the article fails to tell you which is not news at all is the that Walmart is rated number 2 of the top 500 US companies and Costco is number 24. In fact, Walmart’s profits for 2012 are only $10 million less than Costco’s total sales for 2012.

Articles like this are a waste of space. Next time, maybe run some of Steve Breen’s cartoons, if you run out of business news.

Derik Martin

La Mesa

We owe it to future generations

Climate change. It’s been discussed on the campaign trail, in Congress, in the media, and everywhere in between. While world leaders hold many of the cards in shaping future climate change policy, we can all slow down global warming.

One simple yet effective step we can take to reduce our carbon footprint is to eat less meat, say by participating in Meatless Monday. And we can start on Earth Day, which coincidentally happens to fall on a Monday this year.

According to the United Nations, meat production is responsible for nearly 20 percent of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions — that’s more than the entire transportation sector combined. It’s because animal farms use up vast amounts of land, water and fossil fuels, and farm animals emit high amounts of CO2 and methane.

While solving climate change is a tall order, we owe it to future generations to take action. Let’s take it one Meatless Monday at a time.

Kath Rogers

San Diego

In Rich Lowry’s piece in the U-T on Wednesday, April 3 (“The new deniers on climate change”), he states that we “liberals” are in denial about the facts of global warming. He states as fact that there has been no global warming in the past decade. I don’t know where he gets his information, but here is some from NASA, which is a non-partisan organization:

In 2012, arctic summer ice was the least extensive on record.

Sea level has risen at the alarming rate of 4 to 8 inches in the past 100 years.

Greenland ice loss doubled between 1996 and 2005.

CO2 levels are at their highest in 650,000 years.

The warmest decade on record had been 1/2000 to 12/2009.

This last fact is diametrically opposite to his stated assertion that there has been no warming in the last decade.

I don’t know why everything has to be labeled either conservative or liberal. This issue is too important to leave to the likes of Mr. Lowry and his partisan political agenda. We are on a course of human history headed for the rocks if we don’t do something to put a halt to this runaway warming trend. We can do it and we should do it but those who are in denial of the facts are likely to wait until the ocean is covering their houses before acting.